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Friday, August 29, 2014

Massive, open, online courses could be reshaping the typical college classroom. Tonight, PBS NewsHour Weekend Anchor Hari Sreenivasan looks at how in the third story in his Rethinking College series.
The
classes, known as MOOCs, were once hailed as the next big disruption to
traditional higher education, opening the door to a college education
to anyone, anywhere in the world. But the low percentage of students who
complete such classes on their own, and the fact that most people who
sign up for MOOCs already have a college degree, have educators
rethinking how the new format for college coursework can best be put to
use.

AAUPAugust 29th, 2014
The AAUP today wrote to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
chancellor Phyllis Wise to express deep concern about actions taken
against professor Steven Salaita. "Aborting an appointment in this
manner without having demonstrated cause has consistently been seen by
the AAUP as tantamount to summary dismissal, an action categorically
inimical to academic freedom and due process and one aggravated in his
case by the apparent failure to provide him with any written or even
oral explanation," the letter says, adding that Salaita should receive
full pay until the university's Committee on Academic Freedom and
Tenure, which has initiated an examination of the case, has concluded
its proceedings. See the full letter.

If T.S. Eliot had become a tenured professor, he would never have
insisted April was the cruelest month. As those of us in the liberal
arts know, it is August. Not only must we stir ourselves to bolt
together syllabi and prepare lectures—acts that ping-pong between the
drearily practical and ludicrously utopian—but we often do so not
knowing if our classes will "make." Poor Eliot, who would have shown us
fear in a handful of dust. Try showing us just a handful of names on an
enrollment sheet—there’s real fear.
Ten had long been the magic number at my university: the minimum
necessary for a class to make. But as befitted a magic number, it
contained a certain amount of swerve. Department chairs had swerve in
deciding whether to give a green light to a class that fell shy of this
minimum. Perhaps a new course required cultivation; perhaps majors
required an old course for graduation. Or perhaps, just perhaps, it was a
matter of education: The chair knew that the five or six students who
signed up for a particular class

Scientists who use government money to conduct genomic research will
now be required to quickly share the data they gather under a policy
announced on Wednesday by the National Institutes of Health.
The data-sharing policy,
which will take effect with grants awarded in January, will give
agency-financed researchers six months to load any genomic data they
collect—from human or nonhuman subjects—into a government-established
database or a recognized alternative.
NIH officials described the move as the latest in a series of efforts
by the federal government to improve the efficiency of
taxpayer-financed research by ensuring that scientific findings are
shared as widely as possible.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

The chancellor of Montana State University-Northern resigned Thursday morning, effective on Friday, the Havre Daily News reports.
In an email to the campus, James Limbaugh, who had been chancellor
since 2012, said “continuing controversy on campus and in the community”
had made it difficult for the institution to move forward.
Mr. Limbaugh has dealt with a handful of controversies during his
tenure. In June it was revealed that a former provost had been accused
of inappropriately touching a dean.
Mr. Limbaugh was accused of retaliating against the dean, who had filed
a sexual-harassment complaint against the former provost. Earlier this
month the university’s football coach resigned after having been placed on administrative leave.
The university’s faculty union had planned to propose a vote of no
confidence in Mr. Limbaugh on Thursday afternoon, according to a Havre Daily News source.

The Chronicle of Higher EducationAugust 28th, 2014
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s philosophy
department has approved a resolution expressing no confidence in the
university’s leadership, The News-Gazette reported.
The resolution cites concerns about the university’s decision not to hire
Steven G. Salaita, a professor who had been offered a tenured position
in American Indian studies. Mr. Salaita’s job offer was subject to
approval by the university’s Board of Trustees, and the university
decided not to send his appointment to the board for its approval after
Mr. Salaita drew scrutiny for tweets that were sharply critical of
Israel.

A professor at Ariel University, in Israel, has accused the institution of dismissing him over his political views, Haaretz has reported.
A disciplinary panel said the professor, Amir Hetsroni, was being
dismissed for “conduct inappropriate for a member of the faculty.” He
had been accused in a complaint of making disparaging comments on his
Facebook page about an Internet forum for women who were victims of
sexual assault. The newspaper reported in April that the complaint had
been withdrawn at the university’s request.

The University of Miami has an unusual system in which all faculty
members get a vote—albeit a nonbinding one—on whether to retain their
dean. That’s given Miami an even more unusual problem, now that three
leading deans have been rejected.
The deans include the heads of Miami’s most financially important
school, medicine, and arguably its most renowned, marine science. And
despite the faculty rejections, the university’s president, Donna E.
Shalala, has decided to keep both. The third dean, in engineering,
agreed to step down after a follow-up review.
The reasons behind the faculty votes are different in each case, said
Steven M. Green, a longtime professor of biology and former head of the
university’s Faculty Senate. But the trio of rare votes generally
reflects professors’ sensing "varieties of incompetence and malfeasance"
in their leadership, Mr. Green said.

When I was an undergrad in the ’90s, there was little more exciting than the first day of class. What will my professor be like? What books will I be reading? How many papers will I have to write? Answers
came readily, in the form of a tidy one-page document that consisted
solely of the professor’s name and office hours, a three-sentence course
description, a list of books, and, finally, a very brief rundown of the
assignments (papers, exams) and their relevant dates. This was a course
syllabus in 1996, and it was good.
If, like me, you haven’t been a college student since the Clinton
administration—but, unlike me, you also haven’t been a professor
today—then you might be equal parts impressed and aghast at what is required for a coursesyllabus now. Ten, 15, even 20
pages of policies, rubrics, and required administrative boilerplate,
some so ludicrous (“course-specific expected learning outcomes”) that I
myself have never actually read parts of my own syllabi all the way through.

College presidents want to help graduates find jobs but believe their
institutions are struggling to do so, according to a recent survey by
Gallup and Inside Higher Ed.
Nearly nine in 10 presidents said an emphasis on “critical thinking”
skills and personal development is very important throughout college in
order for graduates to get jobs. But only about 40 percent of the
presidents think their own institution is very effective at proving
students with those skills and that kind of development.
Eight hundred and one presidents from all kinds of American higher
education institutions filled out the online survey between May 15 and
June 5, though the sample is not representative of the nation’s
colleges.

People get furious with Cynthia Jones. Philosophy is known as the
blood sport of the humanities, and Jones, an associate professor of
philosophy at the University of Texas-Pan American, doesn’t shrink from
conflict. But she’d been sparring not just with fellow philosophers in
seminar rooms, but with people from all corners of her campus.
UT-Pan American, where Jones directs an ethics center, sits about 20
miles from the Mexican border. The university is not connected to the
big money in Texas. To survive, the ethics center needs external
funding. In seeking outside grants, however, Jones made enemies -- and
ran into ethical quandaries she didn’t expect.
“Pretty much everyone I’ve taken money from over the years, somebody
didn’t like,” she said. “There is no moral exemplar of goodness that I
can take money from but that no one’s pissed off about … I’ve had people
yell at me from all seven colleges on my campus.”

A state appeals court has ruled that the University of Missouri
system does not have to release course syllabi, as they are the
intellectual property of the faculty and therefore exempt from the
state’s open-records law, the Columbia Daily Tribune reports.
The decision, handed down on Tuesday, is the latest chapter in a bid by the National Council on Teacher Quality to rank teacher-preparation programs
by obtaining course syllabi and other materials from institutions
nationwide. The group sued a handful of university systems that would
not release syllabi it had requested, including in Minnesota, Missouri,
and Wisconsin.

The Chronicle of Higher EducationAugust 27th, 2014
The College of Coastal Georgia said on Wednesday that a chemistry
professor had removed a rule from his syllabus that had warned students
that they faced grade reductions for disrupting class by saying “bless
you” when someone sneezes.
News of the rule went viral after drawing the ire of national conservative news media.
The college said the professor, Leon C. Gardner, had made the rule to
stop class disruptions and not to advance any religious or political
viewpoint.
On his class syllabus,
Mr. Gardner wrote that saying “bless you” is “especially rude” and that
disruptive behaviors could result in a deduction of as much as 15
percent of the final grade. Other examples of disruptive behaviors on
his list included being late to class and getting up to sharpen a
pencil.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

A federal judge has ruled that the University of Missouri system does
not have to turn over course syllabi, as they are the intellectual
property of the faculty and therefore exempt from the state’s
open-records law, the Columbia Daily Tribune reports.
The decision, handed down Tuesday, is the latest chapter in a bid by the National Council on Teacher Quality to rank teacher-preparation programs
by obtaining course syllabi and other materials from institutions
nationwide. The group sued a handful of university systems that would
not release syllabi it requested, including in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Missouri.

The student didn’t probably didn’t mean for her words to sting.
"[A]ll classes are sorta boring,” she said. “Yours was less boring than most.”
But sting they did – a searing capstone to what Mark C. Carnes
already knew was a lost semester, both for him and for his students.
They said they liked the class well enough, but their disengagement –
the blank stares, the palpable ennui – said otherwise.
No one was necessarily to blame; after all, Carnes remembered, he,
too, had found his own undergraduate coursework “sorta boring.” And the
sentiment went way back in American higher education, he thought; Henry
Adams wrote in 1918 that his Harvard professors had “taught little, and
that little ill.”
But the notion of being boring ate away at Carnes in the winter break
after he heard those words. Luckily, the professor of history at
Barnard College didn’t stay down for long. He set about crafting a
radical new way of teaching that, nearly two decades later, has a kind
of cult following among professors in the U.S. and abroad.

In discussions about the gender gap among tenured professors at
research universities, there is little dispute that there are far more
men than women with tenure in most disciplines. But why? Many have
speculated that men are outperforming women in research, which is
particularly valued over teaching and service at research universities.
With women (of those with children) shouldering a disproportionate share
of child care, the theory goes, they may not be able to keep up with
publishing and research to the same extent as their male counterparts.
A study presented here Sunday at the annual meeting of the American
Sociological Association finds that those assumptions may be untrue in
some disciplines. The study compared tenure rates at research
universities in computer science, English and sociology -- and then
controlled for research productivity.
Not only are men more likely than women to earn tenure, but in
computer science and sociology, they are significantly more likely to
earn tenure than are women who have the same research productivity. In
English men are slightly (but not in a statistically significant way)
more likely than women to earn tenure.

At a teaching workshop last week, a new faculty member asked me how I
felt about students using laptops in the classroom. I replied, “I ask
students not to use laptops in my classroom—unless a student tells me
they need or strongly prefer a laptop to take notes (for any reason), in
which case we make that work.” She looked relieved to have this
endorsement of a learning zone with fewer electronic distractions.

Although I had taught for more than 20
years, I didn’t realize that I had forgotten what it was like to teach
in a classroom without cellphones until I came up with a plan to relive
those halcyon days. It was near the end of the semester, and I offered
one point of extra credit per class period for my psychology students
who turned off their cellphones before class and put them on the front
desk.
I was sure that no students would part with their phones for such a
meager offering. Wrong: Virtually all my students did. They even said
they loved the idea, so the next semester I offered all my classes the
same deal for the entire semester, and participation continued unabated.
In fact, much to my surprise, after the first few days, when I walked
into my classes all the cellphones were already on the table in the
front of the room.

Colleges and universities across the United States are opening for the
2014-2015 academic year, in an era when much seems to be new in higher
education. I can recall the wisdom of one of my own professors, who
would say, "When you're told that something is new and unknown, reach
back for something older and forgotten, and see if it's true." American
writer Willa Cather provides a portrait of public university life in The Professor's House,
published in 1925. How dated is 90 years ago, in the lifespan of the
American university? What's new in higher education, and what's not?

Aug. 26 has been designated by President Obama as
Women’s Equality Day in honor of the date on which the 19th Amendment
was certified. The amendment guaranteed all women the right to vote,
which had historically been denied to them. Even though this landmark
legislation was ratified 94 years ago, just as much emphasis should be
placed on the issues that threaten sex equality today. It is important
to celebrate past victories as well as ensuring there will be many more
to come.

The Obama administration has made great strides in
securing equal treatment for women across the board. But while the
Constitution guarantees women the right to vote, it does nothing to
protect them from the subtle forms of discrimination that exist today.

Women today still make less money than their male
counterparts and face unfair treatment from employers for
gender-specific circumstances such as pregnancie. This pay gap even
exists at the University of Iowa.

According to an April report by the American
Association of University Professors, women who are full professors at
the UI make 85.3 percent of what men do in the same position. The UI has
the largest gap among the three regent universities and Big Ten
institutions for full professors.

It's all over my social media feeds, and all over campus: school is
starting up again. Adjuncts are finding their courses suddenly canceled
or taken away (or, possibly worse, their salaries cut for various
"reasons"). Everyone is making their syllabus, ordering books,
discovering the limitations of the space they've been afforded to teach
in. New jobs are starting, old jobs keep going on.
And this year, I'm participating in just about none of it.
I'm not teaching this semester, not really. No five writing-intensive
courses to prep for. No pre-semester-even-starts emails from students
explaining why they're missing the first week. No last-minute changes.
No classes accidentally scheduled in a bathroom (true story, happened to
my husband).
No, in my new alt-ac position, teaching undergraduates isn't my
focus. I will eventually find my way back into the classroom, but this
first semester, I'm facilitating a one-credit, totally voluntary
graduate class on teaching, and working on developing my workshops. The
one-credit course is a part of a Preparing Future Faculty program for
graduate students, and my primary role is to coordinate guest speakers
and enter grades. Well, it's a bit more than that (I'm making it more
collaborative for the students!) but it's not a
three-times-a-week-heavy-lifting class I've had to develop from
scratch.

A Salem College faculty member last semester took an
uncompromising approach to curbing syllabus and inbox bloat: Why not ban
most student emails?

“For years, student emails have been an assault on
professors, sometimes with inappropriate informality, sometimes just
simply not understanding that professors should not have to respond
immediately,” Spring-Serenity Duvall, assistant professor of
communications at Salem College, wrote in a blog post last week. “In a fit of self-preservation, I decided: no more. This is where I make my stand!”

Duvall’s frustration is shared by many in academe -- or
anyone with an email account -- from faculty members beset by questions
they have answered both in class and in writing to students inundated by
university email blasts. This spring, when Duvall taught at the
University of South Carolina at Aiken, she adopted a new email policy to
cut down on emails from students telling her they would be late, or
would miss class, or would have leave early, or any of the countless
others that could be handled face-to-face.

As the academic labor market turns
grimmer, and tenure-track professorships become scarcer, it’s hard not to
wonder: Who’s getting hired to the desperately-coveted positions that remain?

It’s a question with serious
implications, both for the academy and for the hordes of job-seeking scholars.
Yet it’s been over a decade since anyone made much of an effort to come up with
an answer—to find the names of the fortunate and talented few, across
disciplines, and put them all in one place.

At The Chronicle, we’re well
acquainted with the last serious stab at this. You might remember Lingua
Franca, the late, lamented journal of ideas and academia that stopped
publication in 2001. You might even recall one of the magazine’s keystone
features, Jobtracks. Jobtracks wasn’t fancy—it was essentially a lengthy list
of names and institutions, representing new hires and tenure-winners across the
country—but it was popular and surprisingly comprehensive. Did you land a top
job in linguistics around the turn of the century? If so, Lingua Franca
was going to come looking for your name.

As
the academic labor market turns grimmer, and tenure-track
professorships become scarcer, it’s hard not to wonder: Who’s getting
hired to the desperately-coveted positions that remain?
It’s a question with serious implications, both for the academy
and for the hordes of job-seeking scholars. Yet it’s been over a decade
since anyone made much of an effort to come up with an answer—to find
the names of the fortunate and talented few, across disciplines, and put
them all in one place.
At The Chronicle, we’re well acquainted with the last serious stab at this. You might remember Lingua Franca,
the late, lamented journal of ideas and academia that stopped
publication in 2001. You might even recall one of the magazine’s
keystone features, Jobtracks. Jobtracks wasn’t fancy—it was essentially a
lengthy list of names and institutions, representing new hires and
tenure-winners across the country—but it was popular and surprisingly
comprehensive. Did you land a top job in linguistics around the turn of
the century? If so, Lingua Franca was going to come looking for your name.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/679-who-s-getting-tenure-track-jobs-it-s-time-to-find-out#sthash.XvWSrGmj.dpuf

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Attacking tenure and job protections has become the rage in school
reform circles. In recent years some states have either eliminated
tenure or cut back on teacher job protections by legislative means, and
the courts have become a new battleground since a California judge last
month declared unconstitutional state statutes that give job protections
to teachers. There are two similar lawsuits in New York state and more
are expected to be filed in other states.
If you ask 10 people to
explain tenure for K-12 teachers, most of them would likely say that it
is a job guarantee so ironclad that tenured teachers can’t be fired.
While there are cases in which it takes way too long to remove teachers
who shouldn’t be in the classroom, tenure is not, in fact, a lifetime
job guarantee, as tenured teachers can and do get fired. In this post,
veteran teacher David B. Cohen takes apart some of the “the problem with
tenure” arguments. Cohen is National Board Certified, and is
associate director of the Accomplished California Teachers group. Cohen
is taking a leave this year from teaching to work on a blog and a book
about great teachers and schools around California. This appeared on InterACT, his group’s blog.

The Civil War changed a lot in America. Hundreds of thousands died.
Millions of slaves were freed. And the country’s higher education system
was transformed. A book by a UT history professor—which explores how
the war reshaped colleges—is being honored with a prestigious book
award.
Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War, by Michael David Cohen, research assistant professor of history and assistant editor of The Correspondence of James K. Polk, has won the 2014 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association.
The book was deemed to make “an outstanding contribution to
scholarship in the social foundations of education field.” Cohen will
receive the award at the association’s annual conference in November in
Toronto.

In headline after headline lately, the message is clear: Colleges and
universities must do more to stamp out sexual assault and harassment.
But how much is too much? It’s a question some are asking right now
at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where two philosophy
professors have been sanctioned in recent months for alleged offenses
that their supporters say do not merit the punishment they received.
One professor is facing dismissal for allegedly retaliating against a
graduate student who said she was sexually assaulted by another
philosophy student. The other professor has been reinstated after being
barred from campus. His alleged offense wasn’t sexual in nature, but
some on campus believe he was targeted for his affiliation with the
department; last year, it was put on notice by the administration after
an outside report detailed systemic sexual harassment in its ranks.

As
if there weren’t enough to consider when deciding to accept an academic
job, there’s something new to add to the list: the offer’s stability.
Earlier this month the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign grabbed headlines when it revoked a written job offer
to Steven G. Salaita, a professor who drew accusations of incivility
for his fierce Twitter commentary about Israel. You’ve probably heard
about the case several times over by now, but if not, here’s a quick
recap: Salaita, an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, was
offered a tenured professorship in American Indian studies at Illinois, subject to approval by the university’s Board of Trustees. He gave notice to Virginia Tech and was expected to begin work at the Urbana-Champaign campus last week.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/670-can-the-board-of-trustees-really-revoke-my-job-offer#sthash.taTnWbuV.dpuf

As if there weren’t enough to
consider when deciding to accept an academic job, there’s something new to add
to the list: the offer’s stability.

Earlier this month the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign grabbed headlines when it revoked a written job offer to Steven G.
Salaita, a professor who drew accusations of incivility for his fierce Twitter
commentary about Israel. You’ve probably heard about the case several times
over by now, but if not, here’s a quick recap: Salaita, an associate professor
of English at Virginia Tech, was offered a tenured professorship in American
Indian studies at Illinois, subject to approval by the university’s Board of Trustees.
He gave notice to Virginia Tech and was expected to begin work at the
Urbana-Champaign campus last week.

Adjunct faculty at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC)
have voted to join their colleagues at Georgetown, Howard, George
Washington and American universities and form a union in SEIU Local 500.
A vast majority voted in favor of forming a union, joining a rapidly
growing national union movement to address the crisis in higher
education and the troubling trend toward a marginalized teaching
faculty.

Seventy-five percent of adjunct faculty in Washington, DC are now united in SEIU Local 500.
Professor
Juan Laster, a UDC adjunct, said. “We worked very hard for this
victory, but this is only the first step. I am looking forward to
working with the administration on a first contract that respects our
work as educators and faculty and as a key part of the UDC community. I
am also proud to be joining Howard University as the second HBCU to have
a union for part-time faculty.”

As college students return to classrooms in St. Louis this week, many
will find that lesson plans have been hastily revised to include
sensitive issues of race and policing that were ignited by the fatal shooting on August 9 of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in the suburb of Ferguson, Mo.
On Monday, as thousands of mourners gathered nearby for Michael
Brown’s funeral, area college students were engaging in conversations
about racial profiling, the use of force, and tensions caused by
economic disparities. The links were obvious in fields like criminal
justice and sociology, where professors were able to put a familiar face
on their case studies. But faculty members in education, English,
history, and a wide range of other disciplines also saw teaching
opportunities in a tragedy that has gripped the nation and prompted
calls for change. The Chronicle talked with local professors
about how they planned to tackle such issues in the classroom. Following
are four examples of their plans, in their own words.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Huffington Post - EducationAugust 23rd, 2014
Late Friday afternoon (August 22), the University of Illinois broke its three-week long silence on the controversy regarding the Chancellor's revocation of a tenured offer to Steven Salaita, who had accepted a faculty position in the American Indian Studies Program at the flagship campus at Urbana-Champaign. Chancellor Phyllis Wise and Board of Trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy
both issued statements explaining the revocation, but in terms far more
alarming than the original decision itself. It is not an exaggeration
to say that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees have now declared
that the First Amendment does not apply to any tenured faculty at the
University of Illinois.

A bit of background to Friday's bombshell statements. Last October,
Professor Salaita, then teaching at Virginia Tech, accepted a tenured
offer from the Urbana-Champaign campus. He went through the regular
appointments process at the University of Illinois, and received
approval by the relevant departments and deans after a review of his
scholarship and teaching. The offer, which he accepted,
was conditional on approval by the Board of Trustees. Such approval
clauses are typical in all teaching contracts and had, previously, been
pro forma at Illinois, as they are at all serious universities: it is
not the job of the Board of Trustees of a research institution to
second-guess the judgment of academics and scholars. Well before the
Board took the matter up, even University officials were describing Salaita as a faculty member, and he moved to Illinois and was scheduled to teach two classes this fall.

Institutions say complying with the Affordable Care Act has caused
them to pass on some costs to employees, according to a new survey from
the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
Since the act began to take effect, some 20 percent of institutions
have made changes to benefits in an effort to control associated costs,
the survey says. About the
same percentage of colleges are considering making changes, or making
further changes, in the year ahead. Of those institutions that have made
changes so far, 41 percent have increased employees’ share of premium
costs. Some 27 percent have increased out-of-pocket limits, while about
one-quarter increased in-network deductibles or dependent coverage
costs, or both. Some 20 percent increased employees’ share of
prescription drug costs.

On Friday, officials of the University of Illinois offered their first public explanations of the decision to block the hiring of Steven Salaita.
They denied that his criticism of Israel was the reason, and said that
they were committed to promoting an atmosphere in which people and ideas
are not demeaned.
"What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois
are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse
either viewpoints themselves or those who express them. We have a
particular duty to our students to ensure that they live in a community
of scholarship that challenges their assumptions about the world but
that also respects their rights as individuals," said an email from Phyllis M. Wise (below right), chancellor of the Urbana-Champaign campus where the American Indian studies program offered Salaita a tenured position that he and the department believe he accepted.

Plagiarism appears to be an act that some in academe cannot resist duplicating.
Mustapha Marrouchi, a professor of postcolonial literature at the
University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is facing accusations of dozens of
acts of plagiarism over the past 24 years, even after twice previously
being publicly called out for lifting the words of other scholars.
The documented instances
of Mr. Marrouchi’s quoting the works of others without attribution
include passages in his books, essays, blog posts, and course
descriptions. They begin with his 1990 dissertation as a doctoral
student at the University of Toronto, extend through his four years on
the faculty of Louisiana State University’s English department, and
continue up through three journal articles published last year.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s defense on Friday of
its decision not to hire Steven G. Salaita riled some academics who
have raised fears about the prospect of being subjected to tests of
their civility.
Mr. Salaita was offered a tenured professorship in the university’s
department of American Indian studies, but his appointment was withdrawn
after he drew scrutiny over tweets that were harshly critical of
Israel.
(Looking to catch up on the details of this case? Read this Chronicle article and this piece,
which explains one of the dispute’s key details: Mr. Salaita’s job
offer was subject to approval of the university’s Board of Trustees.
This month Phyllis M. Wise, the campus’s chancellor, and Christophe
Pierre, the University of Illinois system’s vice president for academic
affairs, told Mr. Salaita that the university would not send his
appointment to the board, saying that the board’s approval was
unlikely.)

Weeks after the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign abruptly
revoked a job offer to Steven G. Salaita in the wake of his
controversial tweets about Israel, two scholars have signaled their
protest by pulling out of speaking engagements at the campus, and a
program that was set to host a national gathering there has called its
conference off. Meanwhile, the American Indian studies program, which
Mr. Salaita had been set to join, is scrambling to make up for his
absence.
Mr. Salaita, a former professor of English at Virginia Tech, had been
offered a job as a tenured professor of American Indian studies, but his
appointment was contingent upon approval by the university’s Board of
Trustees. Earlier this month administrators told Mr. Salaita in a letter
that they would not bring his appointment before the board after all.
An affirmative vote, they said, was unlikely.

We are the stoop laborers of higher education: adjunct professors.
As colleges and universities rev for the fall semester, the stony
exploitation of the adjunct faculty continues, providing cheap labor for
America’s campuses, from small community colleges to knowledge
factories with 40,000 students. The median salary for adjuncts,
according to the American Association of University Professors, is
$2,700 per three-credit course. Some schools raise this slightly to
$3,000 to $5,000; a tiny few go higher. Others sink to $1,000. Pay
scales vary from school to school, course to course. Adjuncts teaching
upper-level biophysics are likely to earn more than those teaching
freshman grammar.
There is no uniformity, but similarities abound. Benefits, retirement
packages, health insurance? Hardly. Job security? Silly question. An
office? Good luck. A mailbox? Maybe. Free parking? Pray. Extra money for
mentoring and counseling students? Dream on. Chances for advancement?
Get serious. Teaching assistants? Don’t ask.
AAUP reports that part-timers now make up 50 percent of total faculty.
As adjuncts proliferate, the number of tenured jobs falls. Why pay full
salaries when you can get workers on the cheap?

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Nonreligious private colleges gave professors and instructors higher pay
across all ranks than did institutions in other sectors, with the
largest gap at the full-professor level. Women still lagged at least
somewhat behind in pay at most institutions and at most ranks; they came
closest to gender equity at two-year institutions. (Find more-detailed
salary data, sortable by institution, here. See average faculty salaries at four-year colleges, by discipline and rank, here.)

Only one research institution, Benedictine University, more than doubled
in size over the 10-year period, but all the private nonprofit master's
institutions on the top-20 list did, and so did six of the public
master's institutions.

Even the banished have their company.
Graham B. Spanier saw his towering reputation as Pennsylvania State
University’s president left in tatters in the wake of a sex-abuse
scandal, and many of his old allies have faded away.
But a few people are gathering in the corner of this ousted
administrator, who is fighting to clear his name in court and to
rehabilitate his image in public.
More than 20 months have passed since Mr. Spanier was charged with
what prosecutors call a conspiracy to cover up the crimes of Jerry
Sandusky, a former Penn State assistant football coach who was
convicted, in 2012, on 45 counts related to child molestation. With Mr.
Spanier’s criminal trial looming, a loose affiliation of lawyers,
trustees, professors, investigative bloggers, and a high-profile
public-relations executive have formed a protective circle around the
former president.

Most faculty members aren’t trained counselors, but they may find
themselves on the front lines of the campus sexual assault problem
anyway. Based on course content, a personal connection, or a feeling
that they have nowhere else to turn, students sometimes disclose their
experiences with assault or harassment to trusted professors who want to
help but aren’t sure how. Other faculty members who don't have students
confiding in them may still want to do more to curb sexual violence on
their campuses. And others have been outspoken about the issue and faced
pushback from fellow faculty members or administrators.
A new national organization, Faculty Against Rape, or FAR, aims to
help professors obtain resources on campus sexual assault and to build a
sense of community and protection among like-minded peers (FAR’s
website tagline is “Protect your academic freedom”).

A group of 22 individuals that includes college presidents, business
leaders, academics, and others has signed on to a report calling on
trustees to take a more active role in college governance.
The report, “Governance for a New Era: A Blueprint for Higher Education Trustees,” was released
on Tuesday by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It stemmed
from a project led by Benno Schmidt, chairman of the City University of
New York’s Board of Trustees and a former president of Yale University.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Harvard
University has retained the top spot in the annual Academic Ranking of
World Universities, a position it has held for the past 12 years. The
rankings, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, based on
indicators such as academic quality and research performance, were
released Aug. 15.

Stanford
University was second, followed by, in order, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology; the University of California, Berkeley; and the
University of Cambridge.

The
United States had 146 universities in the top 500, followed by Germany
with 39, Britain with 38 and China, excluding Hong Kong, with 32.

An
academic at the University of Macau says that he believes that his
contract was not renewed because of his political activism, raising
concerns about academic freedom in the Chinese territory.

Bill Chou Kwok-ping,
an associate professor of political science, has been a vocal proponent
of increased democratization in Macau, a former Portuguese colony. In
July, he was elected vice president of the New Macau Association, one of
the territory’s leading pro-democracy organizations.

The university began
investigating Professor Chou last year, and in June, it announced that
it was suspending him for 24 days without pay over complaints that he
attempted to impose his political beliefs on students, failed to provide
different perspectives in class and discriminated against students.

The leaders of the Modern Language Association and other
scholarly groups have added their voices to the chorus of academics calling on
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to reconsider its decision
not to hire a professor who has drawn scrutiny for his harsh criticisms of
Israel.

Steven G. Salaita had been offered a job as a tenured
professor of American Indian studies, but his appointment was subject to
approval by the university’s Board of Trustees. The university told Mr. Salaita
it would not bring his appointment before the board, saying it believed the
board’s approval was unlikely.

The
leaders of the Modern Language Association and other scholarly groups
have added their voices to the chorus of academics calling on the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to reconsider its decision not to hire a professor who has drawn scrutiny for his harsh criticisms of Israel.

Steven G. Salaita had been offered a job as a tenured
professor of American Indian studies, but his appointment was subject to
approval by the university’s Board of Trustees. The university told Mr.
Salaita it would not bring his appointment before the board, saying it
believed the board’s approval was unlikely.

- See more at:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/mla-and-other-groups-urge-u-of-illinois-to-reconsider-handling-of-israel-critic/84257#sthash.3en1ip7o.dpuf

The
leaders of the Modern Language Association and other scholarly groups
have added their voices to the chorus of academics calling on the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to reconsider its decision not to hire a professor who has drawn scrutiny for his harsh criticisms of Israel.

Steven G. Salaita had been offered a job as a tenured
professor of American Indian studies, but his appointment was subject to
approval by the university’s Board of Trustees. The university told Mr.
Salaita it would not bring his appointment before the board, saying it
believed the board’s approval was unlikely.

- See more at:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/mla-and-other-groups-urge-u-of-illinois-to-reconsider-handling-of-israel-critic/84257#sthash.3en1ip7o.dpuf

The
leaders of the Modern Language Association and other scholarly groups
have added their voices to the chorus of academics calling on the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to reconsider its decision not to hire a professor who has drawn scrutiny for his harsh criticisms of Israel.

Steven G. Salaita had been offered a job as a tenured
professor of American Indian studies, but his appointment was subject to
approval by the university’s Board of Trustees. The university told Mr.
Salaita it would not bring his appointment before the board, saying it
believed the board’s approval was unlikely.

- See more at:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/mla-and-other-groups-urge-u-of-illinois-to-reconsider-handling-of-israel-critic/84257#sthash.3en1ip7o.dpuf